Argument in Composition. John Ramage
institutions in religion classes focused on practical application of religious principles and beliefs. Charles Taylor has pointed out some of the limitations of ethics at it is taught in philosophy courses insofar as it focuses on the “content of obligation” rather than the figuring out what a good life might entail. In pursuing various “thought experiments” built around moral problems, philosophers tend to help students understand the limitations of extant moral theories more clearly than they help them define for themselves a life worth living. Because writing courses in argument have no obligation to “cover” any particular set of moral theories, we are free to offer students the opportunity to pursue their own definitions. One of the most effective ways to start a conversation among students about their own notion of the good life—as opposed to the way that various philosophers have defined that notion—is to have them discuss Ursula LeGuin’s wonderful short story, “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.” LeGuin’s Omelas is an imagined utopian realm where it would seem the good life, by all the traditional measures, has been achieved. The only problem is that the continued bliss of the entire community is dependent on the continued suffering of one child who is kept in a basement and must never be shown any kindness. Every child in Omelas is told about the suffering child sometime between the ages of eight and twelve. Those who subsequently “walk away”—much to the puzzlement of the narrator—have apparently decided that the enormous quantity of bliss enjoyed by the society does not justify the suffering of one child. Their choice in turn reflects a belief in the parliamentary nature of identity, the belief that it is relational rather than essential, and that hence all who live in Omelas and know of the child’s plight are implicated in its suffering and their ostensible good life is as flawed as their selfhood.
These days, of course, philosophy courses are far from the only place where the growing demand for ethics instruction is being met. As an alternative to philosophy courses, many disciplines today offer their own ethics courses emphasizing recurring ethical issues in the field and canons of behavior derived from the standards of the profession. However well intentioned such courses and however clearly they constitute an acknowledgment of the need for ethics instruction within the academy, they are, we would argue, problematic sites of ethics instruction precisely because there is no fundamental connection between the imperatives of the discipline and ethical imperatives. Moreover, whatever overt instruction in ethics students might receive in such courses must be balanced against tacit forms of ethical instruction they are likely to receive in other courses in their major. Like the obligatory “chapel” attendance that students at many church-affiliated liberal arts colleges chafed against throughout the last century, such courses have an unfortunate tendency to strike students as at best a quaint nod to moral correctness and at worst a distraction from their “real” courses of study.
Take the field of business, for example, a field that has most publicly taken it upon itself to emphasize ethics in recent years, thanks to a number of highly publicized business scandals. Given the regnant economic theories in America today, students are quite likely to be taught, directly and indirectly, in many different courses overseen by many different people, that markets are wiser than human agents. If one wishes to make a prudent decision about the possible consequences of a policy, one is advised to study the performance of the market in similar situations in the past. If one wants to know what has worked and is working, the only verdict that really counts is the one delivered by the market. A “fair” price, thus, is whatever the market will bear, while a “fair” wage is the least the market will allow one to pay. If one is in a position to fiddle the market a bit, allowing one to charge higher prices and pay lower wages, so be it, those sorts of adjustments are built into the market system, and as such are no more blameworthy than holding penalties in professional football. Against the backdrop of this near providential regard for the omniscience of markets, a single course in ethics introducing criteria foreign to the market dynamic into the decision-making process will likely have little effect on students’ priorities or behaviors.
What is lacking in the one-off, business ethics course is the clear connection between “selfhood and morality.” Any course starting with a hyphenated sense of selfhood, self-as-businessperson, inevitably leads to a truncated view of ethical obligation. Burke touches on the nature of the relationship between identity and ethical obligation in the process of defining his central notion of “identification.”
The human agent, qua human agent, is not motivated solely by the principles of a specialized activity however strongly this specialized power, in its suggestive role as imagery, may affect his character. Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action. ‘Identification” is a word for the autonomous activity’s place in this wider context, a place with which the agent may be unconcerned. The shepherd, qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be “identified” with a project that is raising the sheep for market. (Rhetoric 27)
By the same token, corporate management may be consciously acting in interest of its stockholders to increase the return on their investment by performing acts that simultaneously “identify” them with the degradation of the environment their stockholders require to sustain themselves.
Even brief consideration of the connections between the modes of thought promoted by both ethics and rhetoric underscores the advantages of incorporating the teaching of ethics into an argument class One of the most important traits shared by ethics and rhetoric is their focus on process and procedural understanding—“how to”—over declarative knowledge—“what is.” It is this concern with process that allows the two to involve themselves with “specialized activities” of every sort and to move easily between the personal and professional realms. In either case, the processes that ethics and rhetoric are both concerned with involve two stages: a process of selection—identifying the best argument/the most defensible choice—and a process of communication—formulating a justification for the argument or choice and/or promoting its wider adoption. According to most popular views of rhetoric, the first process ending in the choice, is all that is required. There is no further obligation to articulate one’s reasons for making the choice or for sharing the process by which one arrived at the choice. But just as there are arguments for given ethical choices, there is an ethics of argument that requires one to make a case for one’s choices. The difference here between ethical arguments and other sorts of arguments is one of degree rather than kind. While it’s always useful to articulate reasons for one’s choices and while it is prudent to do so whenever one is soliciting others’ support of one’s choice, one is compelled to do so when one’s choice is ethical. The source of this compulsion lies in the nature of ethical choices. In evaluating, say, a college to people who are in the process of choosing a college, we would articulate our criteria in order to help them decide if the college is for them. But if we are making an ethical choice, about, say, justifications for torture, we are saying something much stronger. In making ethical choices we are choosing not just for ourselves in the here and now, but for others and for ourselves in future similar situations. When we term an act ethical, we are not simply saying “I did this,” we are saying, “This ought to be done.” If one, for example, claims that the American government is justified in using torture on enemy combatants, one is opening the way for a shift of the burden of proof from those who pronounce torture unjustifiable to those who support its use, and for the possibility that torture will be tolerated in a variety of other situations, including those situations involving the torture of American troops.
If one is first obliged under an ethic of argument to articulate a rationale for one’s ethical choices, the second obligation one incurs is to ensure that one’s rationale is candid. That is, for the rationale to be helpful, for it to guide further ethical acts, it must not only be truthful but extensive. One must be prepared to acknowledge the full range of choices—not necessarily every one, but all that might seem plausible or probable to those whom one addresses—that one considered prior to making one’s selection. One’s reasons for dismissing or subordinating likely alternatives and for selecting one’s final course of action should be clearly indicated. The principles that guided one in evaluating those choices and the evidence in support of that evaluation should be clearly enumerated. The degree to which one is certain that one has made the best choice should be explicitly registered. (These caveats, along with the term “candor,” are derived from Stephen Toulmin’s treatment